Thursday, March 29, 2012

The Kantara project

It has to be said that life on Kantara has taken me by surprise in a number of ways - none of them unpleasant. The one on my mind at the moment is the degree to which I am finding, with Grace, the need to personalise the boat, not to leave any detail, however small, which was to the taste or preference of the previous owners, but is not to ours.
When we chose Kantara out of the dozens we had looked at, we knew that there was a chance that the wash basin would not be usable long term. We would give it time, and see if we felt it needed to be replaced.

And the time came - pretty quickly! We weren't surprised. That space the basin sits in is just ridiculous! We called in boat fitter Roy Grassby of Days Afloat, and he drew up a plan. After a couple of visits to chat over the plan, and hours of poring over catalogues of basins and taps, we have now booked for the work to be done in the last week of April. We'll take a couple of days to sail down to Braunston, where Roy's workshop is, and we'll have to leave it with him for a couple of weeks - we'll go back to St Albans for the duration.
And then there is the carpet. There's nothing wrong with the look of the carpet, but, well, it's not ours. It started off smelling very doggy, and still does to Grace, despite several cleaning sessions with all sorts of preparations. Our problem is that, as is common of boats of Kantara's age, the carpet is also on the walls, up as far as the gunnels...

...(ignore the seats - they're no longer there), so replacing the floor carpet might also involve replacing that... after removing radiators, wall cabinets, power sockets and hi-fi speakers. Our challenge now is to find a plain carpet of a different colour from this, lay this on the floor and have the existing wall carpet (still in pristine condition) being what in any house would be wallpaper. We think we've found the carpet. Today, we measure up and get it costed.